Wisp in the Dark
by Snarkoleptic
Summary: Anders's unwilling reflection on moments of his life that have sculpted his ... dislike for the dark in his later years.  M for dark themes.  All feedback welcome, but please, be gentle. ;
1. No Good Deed

First fan-fic. Also the first writing I've done in quite some time, so I'm sure there are gaps in my ability to get it out – all feedback is welcome. Every time I hear about Anders not liking the dark, something new pops into my head, so what we have here is a series of shorts in a small arc surrounding that. Although it ended up being a lot darker the more I played with it. I don't even own black lipstick, I swear.

I own nothing, profit from nothing, all glory to BioWare, etc.

* * *

><p><strong>Wisp in the Dark<strong>

_I shall not be left to wander the drifting roads of the Fade_

_For there is no darkness, nor death either, in the Maker's Light_

_And nothing that He has wrought shall be lost._

-Trials 1:14

Much of his life had, in fact, revolved around darkness. Amid the sound of scurrying rats and the restless ailments of lives left behind, he struggles against the sheer volume of hypocrisy his life had shown him in this single verse. Wasn't he himself wrought by the Maker, only to have spent hour after hour, day after interminable day, terrified he'd never find himself again even when the light returned?

But the man squinting over parchment in the thin green light of the hovering wisp, quill in hand, inking protests against the private tortures inflicted in the name of protecting the masses, understands it is past time to overcome just for himself. The suffering and imprisonment of all those countless others like him has to end. _Justice must be served_. That intense, fiery _presence_ at his core will not be denied.

Neither will it be served by dwelling in the darkness of his past. And yet, though he intends to close his mind to his own horrors and confront the greater need in front of him, he finds himself going _back._

* * *

><p><strong>1. No Good Deed<strong>

He wasn't being kept. He was hiding. He was staying protected. By the end of even his fifth summer, he saw the lie for what it was. No, he wasn't hiding. He was being hidden. Fully six summers later, he still hadn't a clue what he was being hidden from.

Cellars. He could only remember two of those. Only twice had they ended up staying long enough in one place to warrant taking up an actual house, but in the time between he remembered longing for the space to stretch out, to move, to breathe.

He was far more accustomed to being locked away in closets and pantries, or the hurried shuffle to bundle him away in a half-empty crate to stay out of sight of fellow travelers when on the road.

If they can't see you, they can't take you away.

_If I can't see me…_

Only once before had he been discovered, just before the last heat broke at the end of that fifth summer. Having been left on the cart under a tarp while his parents resupplied – _and ate, and drank, better fare than the jerky and hardtack and tepid water he might see hours later, if they remembered_ – in an inn somewhere along one of the better-traveled trade routes, somewhere he'd surely no longer recognize. But he hadn't yet been hardened to the way life had to be, and the darkness and heat were so close, warring violently against his newly instilled fear of discovery until they finally won out.

Throwing away a corner of the tarp, he squinted into the sunlight and simply breathed.

Of course the cart was in the open, exposed to the busy trade depot on that well-traveled road. Of course there were comments, shouts of surprise, alarm at seeing where a child had been concealed.

Back on the road, well away from the activity they had so hastily left after his discovery, he felt the lash across his back for the first time.

"What if they'd seen you for what you are? What then?"

"What if they'd thought you'd been taken already? Where are you going if not with us?"

And, over his wailing, high and piteous, "Let the boy scream! Strap ought to teach him to have a care!"

* * *

><p>The cellar door stood open, the boy – he could scarce remember his name, for that's all he'd been now for six summers and more – told to be ready. Fire had broken out, and if it spread on the gusting wind, his parents – <em>saviors – jailers <em>– were prepared to move on entirely to keep their wretched secret.

But through the rare-opened door, he heard more than the fear of the flame, the scrambling of the men to line up for water. He heard a more desperate terror, urgent and pleading, a woman begging for the life of someone pulled from the blaze.

"She's still breathing! Somebody help her!"

_What if they see you for what you are?_

"Please! She's all I have!"

_If I can't see me…_

But he hadn't yet been hardened to the way life had to be, and once again who – _what_ – he'd been told he was lost the war inside his head.

He was up the stairs and out the door, unaware he still carried the pillow he'd picked up to take on the run, past the man and the woman standing at the window considering how best to flee again, how to smuggle their burden out through the chaos. Running toward the voice that had drawn him up, reaching inside for the soothing magic he'd found for himself after too long an acquaintance with the whip, giving everything he had to a girl half his age, watching the blisters and cracks and _pain_ disappear from her face...

He collapsed, too exhausted to register the new panic from the girl he'd healed, and her mother, and half the bucket brigade who had seen him for what he was, and the man with the Sword of Mercy on his breast who hadn't needed to see it to _know…_

As the Templar took him, scant steps away from the cellar he'd just fled, the woman in the window turned away and the man stepped forward to join in passing buckets toward the flames.

* * *

><p>No matter who had held the lash, he had never cried for the pain. He recalls that once, at the end of his fifth summer, his mother had gathered her lost little boy to her skirts and held him while his father tied down the cart to make their escape, all for the benefit of those who looked on from a busy trade depot aside a well-traveled road and none for the comfort of the boy who'd lost his name when he became a burden to be borne.<p>

He also understands that some changes can never come quietly.


	2. As Natural as Sleep

I own nothing, profit from nothing, all glory to BioWare, etc.

**2. As Natural as Sleep**

_With passion'd breath does the darkness creep.  
>It is the whisper in the night, the lie upon your sleep. <em>

-Transfigurations 1:5

As much as he would eventually decry the effects of the taint, he has to admit it's a lifeline for him now. This far into the Deep Roads, there could be no torches, no candles, no wisps – nothing that could end up blinding them if any of the darkspawn in the maze of warrens surrounding them decided to take notice and attack.

Although what the Warden-Commander expected him to do about the light coming off his spells, well… Caron was a hard enough man, Anders let himself have a little thrill at the "I-told-you-so" moment that would surely come the minute Caron called for a fireball.

_One foot in front of the other._

Something else, something new about the darkness this time. Never had he had this much room to maneuver, but without being able to see the space for himself, every step he gained was as much a prison as the last.

_Maker, I can't believe I signed up for this._

Enough time has passed since his last plunge into the dark that the humor – a stronger shield than any steel he could carry – had been holding up very well.

_If I can't see me…_

When they stop to camp, enough time has passed since he's last seen the light that his shield was beginning to crack.

* * *

><p>"Out you get, come on."<p>

At the end of his fourteenth summer, the boy saw light again. Taking in the words, the absence of the clove smell that had come in with brief snatches of light and left long after the lashes with the whip, he pushed to his feet. After his second exit from the Circle tower, the Knight-Commander had overridden the mages and ordered a month's solitary confinement to dissuade the young mage from any further escape attempts.

The solitary part had been easy – it wasn't as if he was in the habit of speaking to his fellow apprentices, and he would answer his instructors only when asked a direct question. Occasionally. He had yet to say a single word to a Templar.

Emaciated, stumbling, he stepped out into the hallway, instinctively moving away from the Templar who had opened the door to the cramped room that had made him nothing again, had cost him the little he'd gained that had mattered. On many days he hadn't been able to eat, though food had never been withheld.

He fixated for what felt like an eternity on the torch next to the door, as if he could store some of the blaze to keep him company the next time the dark found him. Thinking this, he remembered one of the first cantrips he'd mastered, the only one he hadn't had trouble casting. At once exhausted and exhilarated with his distance from the cell that had damped his magic, he reached for a bit of power and let memory take over.

If the Templar found it odd to be followed back to the Circle proper by a flickering, barely present wisp of light, he was kind enough to keep it to himself as he knocked smartly on the door of a Senior Enchanter's office. The door opened, and after a moment the Templar nudged the boy forward, perhaps a bit more gently than he might have otherwise. "In you go, boy."

The boy stayed silent for a moment longer, and before stepping in, answered the Templar.

"Anders."

* * *

><p>"Anders!"<p>

Startled out of his reverie by the boom behind his commander's voice, the mage realizes the camp has been largely packed up, the group ready to press further into the Deep Roads.

He hasn't slept.


	3. Curse the Darkness

I own nothing, profit from nothing, all glory to BioWare, etc.

**3. Curse the Darkness**

_The one who repents, who has faith,  
>Unshaken by the darkness of the world,<br>She shall know true peace. _

-Transfigurations 10:1

He's here, against his own better judgment, to say nothing of the spirit presently lurking in the recesses of his consciousness. He's had so many reasons to avoid involvement, all of them playing through his mind with crystal clarity on the endless walk from his clinic, his mind never settling on one over the other as a reason to turn around and forget all the words that have passed between them.

Those he's hurt, innocent for all their experience, who couldn't understand why a mage's life can never be static. Though he was long gone before they realized it, the blade cut both ways, and he had never needed to be there to see the pain, the loss, the abandonment on the faces of those he'd left behind.

And those who had hurt him, when in his weaker moments he had sought comfort from one strong enough to give it. If his life had given him any certainty, it was in the knowledge that none will thirst so much for power as those who are first given a willing sip.

* * *

><p>As Justice retreated and Anders sank to his knees, the foul cavern under the Gallows returned to absolute black. Rigid, unable to move, grasping at fleeting thoughts and hoping one will carry him back to some measure of control, Anders focused on the voice that had called him back from the brink of the unforgivable. He couldn't hold it, kept losing his grasp, felt himself becoming his terror as he had so long ago in the dark cells with the clank of armor and the crack of the whip and the all-pervasive smell of cloves.<p>

And then he saw that familiar face, bathed in pale green light, and as the terror receded so did the worry creasing his friend's brow, to be replaced with … an absence of worry, no more, and no less. No pity, and no blame. There was just one hand extended to help him stand, and one hand carrying a wisp to chase away the darkness.

* * *

><p>Perhaps that distraction, that lack of focus, is what causes him to fixate so quickly on the fire crackling softly behind its grate. Sneaking through the memories of gentle freedom and broken hope is the realization that it isn't yet the season for the fireplace to have been prepared.<p>

He keeps his eyes cast down, sure as he is that his would-be lover would see in them all too plainly the request, the _need_, for the things he's learned time and again he can never have. He's suddenly not sure if he'd remembered earlier, when he said he'd come, to mask any of those things. A hand cups his chin, and the next words he hears carry with them the answer he's sought since before he can remember.

"Anders… there isn't any darkness here."

_If I can't see me… I know you will._


End file.
